Electronic systems and circuits are often utilized in a number of scenarios to achieve advantageous results. Numerous electronic technologies such as computers, video equipment, and communication systems facilitate increased productivity and cost reduction in analyzing and communicating information in most areas of business, science, education and entertainment. Frequently, these activities involve storage of vast amounts of information and significant resources are expended storing and processing the information. When archival or duplicate storage features are included the amount of storage resources involved can increase by orders of magnitude. Providing and managing the storage resources can be expensive and difficult.
Some traditional systems attempt to use thin provisioning approaches to reduce the amount of storage resources. For example, traditional data centers often include several storage arrays and attempt to implement thin provisioning support in which there can be several tier one servers hosting production applications trying to access the thin storage. However, in a thin storage environment there is usually over-subscription and the over-subscription often results in the file system(s) behavior being degraded by I/O errors and inconsistency if the thin pool space is exhausted by consumption or utilization. In such cases, there is usually no way from the server side to know the root cause of the I/O errors or failures on the file system front. While some traditional storage array vendor tools may have attempted to implement threshold setting capabilities on the array/enclosure side, they typically don't have the linkage across the host and array side in a convenient and efficient configuration (e.g., organized interlinking, “visible in a single pane of glass”, etc.).